Sunday, February 24, 2013

Christmas brought a new toy to our home. Under the tree was a wonderful surprise - A Baby Wolfe - a floor loom that is! A loom already lives in our home. About a year ago, I received a Schacht 10 inch Cricket Loom, sometimes called a knitter’s loom. I have had fun with it making scarves and spa cloths. It’s great for small projects and for traveling.

Tartan Scarf on Cricket Loom

My husband, Tom, noticed how much fun I was having with it, when I wasn’t knitting or babysitting our grandchildren. He also noticed that there were times that I was quite frustrated when I wanted to do more than plain weave and it took so much hand manipulating of the yarns.

During show and tell at our local TKGA guild meeting, I showed my finished knitted projects and some of my weaving projects. I mentioned some of my frustrations. One of the members, Barb, a knitter as well as a weaver, noted that one of the other members of the guild, Jean, was looking to sell her floor loom. I contacted her and she sold us her Baby Wolfe with a few accessories.

The new year started with me reading weaving books and watching several DVDs. I have a fairly large stash of yarn. Many of the skeins were purchased before I became a yarn snob. There is a good amount of acrylic and dishcloth cotton. I also have a few cones of cotton yarn from my days of machine knitting.

I opened Peggy Osterkamp’s book Weaving for Beginners and warped the sampler on the loom with some sports weight acrylic in (horrors) pink and white. I hate pink. Why was it in my stash? I thought this would be a great way to get rid of it.

Boy, there is a lot to learn to use the floor loom as compared with the Cricket. For one, weaving is such a small part of the finished product and I am all about the finished product.

While watching Marilyn Van der Hoogt’s DVD Warping Your Loomshe comments that if you can learn to love winding the warp, sleying the reed, threading the heddles, tying up the treadles and tying the warp to the beams, then you will love all the parts of weaving.

So heeding Marilyn’s advice, I put on some easy jazz music and started dressing the loom. I had my second warp on the Baby Wolfe - dishtowels using dish cotton. The are finished. I’ll post pictures soon.